I'm now convinced that what we call our "mind" or "self" is a phylogenetic construction created between individual ape-like organisms with greater bipdeal uprightness, hands with better dexterity, etc.
The thought dawned upon me while I was playing basketball at the leisure center. I went there a little bit high (bad habit) and I mention this only to provide a physiologic frame for what my affective state was like. I began thinking about how well I was doing. Which was perhaps prompted by thoughts about the meaning and significance of playing at the gym on Tuesday when adult pickup starts. I saw the Indian kid who once took a fair bit of pleasure in blocking my shot. The message was clear: I'm tall, you're short, shown with zest with the added wiz of a ball hurling in the other direction.
The Indian kid seems to be about 16. He's about 6'1. Maybe 6'2. He's typical for kids these days. Basketball oriented, he wears all the gear that brands him as 'this type of person'. I get the message and try to calm my impulsion to enact an irritated look. Why bother? I then become conscious of myself, of my ability, of the temerity of my affective state: how can he world feel so different now, be so different now? I got to learn that this is a stupid, pointless question. Powerful - but you need to contain it or you'll be sent into endless iterations of the same feeling: it's overwhelming.
I did however get an idea that impressed me. In the past, I existed almost entirely, about a depressing 99 out of 100 times, in a state of unresolved traumatic vigilance. The disordered stress response, now in full swing (say, in 2002) is mutating in a certain way. I become hyper-focused on the voice. The brain now links the voice - the vehicle of self-expression (and development) is broken. When I speak, I do not speak from my body, but from an overly concerned frame of reference that lies outside me altogether.
Trauma heightens the environment, and in particular, the reality of the object. I see myself, unconsciously, enacting not merely the trauma, but the actors on the other side who contributed to the creation of these states: I unconsciously experience them as the view that I ascribe to myself. Being in the presence of other people at 7 pm, perhaps not so long as 3 years ago, was compulsively experienced as tense. Even till this day, I reach a point of 'complexity' that is difficult to track and thus bring back to a stable ground. I can get lost, and the only way out is to limit information from everything except the body.
This story is all about the way the environment "hides" within the ways we act with people. The environment, of course, is the minds and intentional states of other people. When we act, and when we reflect, we do it in tacit reference to the memory of past experiences, and the 'meanings', as affects and cognitive percepts, are "ejected" at later times with only the felt affects/cognitions that come along in a conscious state to dominate awareness.
This makes more sense than you realize. Human brains today are constructions of at least 500,000 years of significant 'altruistic evolution'. I say 'altruistic', because organisms within primate lineages (there were multiple, co-evolving species of human-like creatures) became more intuitively engaged with one another's intentional states. Intentional states for knowing, but at a certain threshold, consciousness became deep enough to sense affective states in partners, and to feel the pleasure of aligning oneself, and helping out another creature.
Evolutionary psychologists give such short shrift to the reality of the existential - that is, of pain, suffering, and the way these experiences stand out in human awareness. Is pain - and the recursive, deeply aware consciousness of it - not uncomfortable, and thus, act as a "negative reenforcement"? In complexity theory language, suffering would compel some sort of creative solution. The solution, of course, is already present in lower animals as bonding and connecting; it's love. But for us higher primates, experiencing the suffering of another stimulated our brains to want to say something or, as is likely the case, make a gesture, such as a hug, to comfort, console, and change the affective state (which is what is being 'read') of the other.
Our human brains today are built out of interest and love. The so-called "machivaellian" brain merely co-opts a system that has built itself mostly from altruistic experiences: hence the reality of psychopatholgy - that every human being is psychodynamically bound to one another through affects such as shame; and through affects, we usually do the same things to get rid of them (dissociate conscious attention from them); and thus much of our societal behaviors are emergent properties of dissociation - a hyper-emphasis on ephemeral things, a short term, individualistic, competitive "game" (until, of course, the emotions of life present their experience in a negative way, forcing a reassessment on things).
The self and the object are the two poles. I am the consciousness who observes the objects: yet I am an object to myself. I've come to this state of affairs via countless iterations of an evolutionary process that has created creatures of a similar phenomenology. We each create ourselves without awareness of the ontological 'structure' of self and other.
The theory of evolution changes how we think about the psychology of the mind. The functions of adapt to survive, and the emergence of love as an antidote, as a way to 'bind' individual 'actors' one to another - is this way of speaking concealing an utter oneness between parts, whose very sense of selfhood, naively extolled in the business notion of "self-interest, is a product of the self-other process, whereby the mind monitors the other as well as the self, encouraging actions that yield positive feedback and discouraging actions that yield the opposite?
The greatest challenge for the future of homo sapiens is whether we truly develop the 'sapiens sapiens' part of our moniker. Can we have the wisdom to understand the necessity of developing children that can break the dissociative process, and do what evolution makes instinctively impossible: think about those things which make us uncomfortable, but nevertheless need to be spoken about. Climate change and the costs we must absorb; talking about mental illness, death, inequality and the discomfort it no doubt costs us to talk about it.
Part of the naivete in the human condition is the conviction that we 'know' something to be true even though our biology is built to 'scaffold' our psychology, that is, to bias our thinking so that we think mostly good 'regulating' experiences of ourselves, as opposed to those which present us to ourselves badly. It is imperative that people understand that this is the actual reality: this is not an 'opinion', but the most plausible, empirically supported description of how human consciousness functions and under what circumstances it evolved to become as it has.
The only rational conclusion about our condition is a paradoxical one: we are individuals yet we are psychically bound to one another. Anything I do influences your response. So long as dissociation - the process which 'deemphasizes' certain past experiences by generating desires that bring our mind some place else can ping and pong people back and forth while each party secretly (to themselves) confabulates another reason (one that doesn't bespeak shame) for why they believe what they do.
Human minds and all that they create are dynamic processes bounded by the inherent limits in a physical system. We have only so many neurons mediating our phenomenology. The meaning one situation has for us interacts with those before and the context that come next. The utter immaturity of dorso-cortical networks makes metacognitive self-control an impossibility for very young children (2 years to 6 years) and even when kids seem to have more self-awareness, or 'moral awareness', in their teens, they are still surprisingly inhibited by the force of cultural standards in self-representation. Not just dress, but being able to talk openly about emotions and feelings is largely experienced with discomfort, which then elicits a dissociation - the unconscious searching for "cognitive coherency", by locating a more palatable frame of reference, and so teens, undergoing neurological 'remodeling' themselves, naturally enact the "low road" behaviors to manage the affective challenges created by highschool.
Tuesday, 1 September 2015
Saturday, 29 August 2015
Psychological Trauma and Shame in the Evolutionary Process
I'm very interested in the process behind the evolution of human minds. How did it happen? How did this incredible creature - us - who see the world as they do, come to experience themselves as they do?
My studies have brought me to this conclusion. The self, or the thing we think about, as us, is a construction built out of a recursive, positive feedback between individual primate minds taking a bigger and deeper interest in one another. What is this 'bigger and deeper interest'? Michael Tomasellos ideas about shared intentionality, and in particular, his analysis of chimp and human communication in his book 'the origins of human communication' settles the body as the primary locus of cognitive development: chimp and bonobo (our closest genetic relatives) minds are 'built' up from the bottom - from the body; it is not their vocal attempts, but their gestural actions, that indicate the presence of a cognitive creature.
Tomasello and the other evolutionary psychologists (scientists and philosophers) I've read are more cognitively oriented, which for me misses a big piece of the puzzle. Tomasello is right about the primacy of the body - and thus in human speech - as the research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson has shown, large chunks of our language are unconscious metaphorical constructions of a metaphorically biased mind. The world makes sense this way because the brain is always organizing and cross-referencing different types of information. The types of creatures that we are - visually dominant with tool like hands - has to integrate different modalities to form a coherent reality. Sounds and vocalizations, pitches, timbers and other acoustic elements, present themselves 'this way or that way'. Take the devils note, the 'tritone' in music. When people hear that we all naturally react in a similar way. High tones are soft, sensuous, and safe. Words like nipple and tip and blip and sip - it isn't a coincide that these sounds share the same theme: smallness. They sound 'small' because it is high and pitchy. In fact, smaller creatures tend to produce a more high pitch sound while large creatures produce lower pitch sounds.
Integration, consolidation, and increased complexity, all have to operate in the service of coherency - homeostasis for the body - but psychologically speaking, a sense of stability for the mind. Evolution maintains a marvelous balance of forces within the body, so it should not be surprising that the mind is similarly organized.
But before I get ahead of myself, let me lay out three principles that I think operate in the evolution of human consciousness. They are aspects of one process, but because of it's nature, it's difficult, not to mention uncommon, for the human mind to be presented this way:
i) Adaptation
ii) Affect Regulation
iii) Coherency
The first idea is basically the working process of biological evolution. The organism at the cellular level is amazingly complexly organized; in multicellular creatures, each cell is exquisitely intertwined with the activity and function of other cells. But it can be hard, and even tempting, to exclude the very consciousness we use from this similar process.
Thankfully, us humans are hardy - and heartful - creatures equipped with tremendous plasticity. The second idea, affect regulation, is basically what the human mind is designed to do. The way we think, we're unconsciously brought to assume that we are the true deciders of our actions; and even worse, we develop philosophies and ideologies that reify certain ideas about the world (and ourselves) that fly in the face of a much sounder reflection.
Affect regulation is the way an organism self organizes in response to environmental threats and attractions. It is basically automatic (Ledoux, Anxious) but also has a basic consciousness component (what it is like to be aroused or distressed) for every creature with a complex nervous system. Negative experiences that hyper-arouse the organism destabilizes neuroendocrinological systems like the HPA axis. An organism needs to return to a normal equilibrium - or psychological 'homeostasis' - after hypo-arousal, and it appears there is a mechanism that follows severe arousal that allows a 'discharge' from an overly aroused procedural motor circuitry. Peter Levine sees this discharge as the "shake" an animal makes after an affectively traumatic experience.
Coherency is a distinctly human concept that is fundamentally related both to the nature of human consciousness, and the process of affect regulation itself.
Imagine Australopithecus, a creature that seems to be man 4 million years ago. Australopithecus already shows a departure from the great ape morphology, but is still very ape like. It's brain is small - chimp like - and so likely was its behavior. However, it was largely arboreal - living on the ground and so needing to become more aware of the threats below it.
Homo Habilis comes along 2.5 million years later and the head is bigger. What happened during this transition, phenomenologically? What engendered this shift?
Theories abound, but I want to consider one related to the communicative process itself. Working from Michael Tomasellos obvious theory (in light of modern traumatology) the shared-intentionality hypothesis, I am interested in the very nature and structure of modern human conscious itself. That is, the two poles which makes up our mind and even gives us the sense of a "self": Self and Object.
Shuffling back to Tomasellos theory about chimp communication, I am intrigued by the way he describes great ape minds as "cognition for competition". Tomasello presents chimps as acting imperatively - that is, for themselves - and when relating with humans, although they begin to learn that humans are benevolently disposed towards them, they nevertheless struggle with interpreting human action as concerned about them. When chimps see you pointing for something, after a while of learning that paying attention to the pointing gesture yields nice rewards (a treat), they begin to respond to a human pointing. But lets say one human drop a treat under a bucket, leaves, and another human comes in and points at the treat. The chimp won't get - doesn't have a working model to support - that the other human is similarly disposed. The chimp doesn't know that the pointing gesture is borne of a a concern that is shared between humans.
It seems the way to get to a steady state of Self-Object consciousness is to build into creatures a disposition towards inquiring about the intentional state of other actors, for their benefit (and also your own!). Tomasello does this by tracing human linguistic communication to gestural communication executed through the body. This is all very cognitive. Interesting, no doubt, but missing out on another sphere of communication - the right brain kind - that 'carries' the narrative-structure of a human life.
Intentional state is the end goal, perhaps, but what is that like on the inside? A gestural action, such as those seen in apes, is very affectively alive. The whole body is in it. In the pointing gesture - something chimps can do - the motion from the body to the object parallels the embodied experience of being a self that wants some thing. The pointing action represents that want, and hence, processes like these, inasmuch as they occur in actors biologically the same, will generate perceptual states that 'converge' on similar phenomenological experiences.
In discussion about human evolution, you seldom here mention of shame. And if it's mentioned, it often seems superficial in its descriptiveness. This is odd, because shame may in fact be - and to me, actually is - the phenomenological condition required to maintain states of "shared-intentionality" between human agents.
From the perspective of the human nervous system, the body can be either aroused via sympathetic, HPA networks mediated by ventral tegmental area, or hypoaroused by parasympathetic networks like the lateral tegmental area (PAG) and the dorsal portion of the vagus nerve. These two, oscillating systems keep the organism affectively alert to threats in the environment. This process is being called 'neuroception', and serves as an unconscious system that organizes object-relations with bodily processes like metabolic homeostasis.
But how does this system operate, phenomenologically? The phenomenology, it must be stated, is at first very passive vis-a-vis environmental input. The brain is very small and very unmyelinated at birth to pass through the cervix. Experiences to come will shape the brain and at the same time will shape subsequent experiences. Good experiences will stand out with particular objects, and likewise negative experiences. Those that occur most commonly will fill-out hyper myelinated circuitry with dense synaptic connectivity. Those that occur less will be 'crowded out' by those that occur most.
What really cements the brain-mind dualism is the process of meaning. Self-Object is the mind of a human being. The human being instinctively builds self with reference to the object. Since the object is essentially other human beings (the source of the self to begin with) the brain is constantly cataloging meanings as it works out a state of coherency. To put this differently, the closed system of the brain needs to 'make psychologically coherent' the various meanings the human organism encounters. This, of course, is a bizarre paradox: the closedness of the brain is BUILT by the openness of the mind; furthermore, the input is the activity of other minds, which our brains, instinctively, self-monitor and imitate as we struggle to make sense of the world around us.
Coherency is the phenomenological process of struggling with the affects that social interaction creates in individual actors. Shame occurs because that's what shared-intentionality required to create minds that cared about one another. Joy, laughter, pleasure - these too are dependent on dyadic interactions: they are emergent properties that follow from the complexities of human meanings.
So back to those old species, those homo's who biased our present brain structure. It bears to point out that not only our cortex, but our amygdala and our upper brain stem are disproportionately large in modern human beings. The biological sociologist Jonathan Turner sees this as a co-evolution between emotional and cognitive processes. So what sort of experiences made this possible?
What about the expanding phenomenology that came with a deeper, more recursive awareness of self and other? Self and other co-evolved, as access to the former follows from access to the latter. When ancient ape-lineages became more interested in one another's knowledge, at some point, the affective program (probably mediated by mirror neurons) referenced the other in constructing a present affect state. How does this happen?
Psychoanalytical and developmental research makes it perfectly clear that right-brain processes 'scaffold' attentional states (contents) that align with the past history and the general needs of an individual human organism. But this is something that is occurring from moment to moment; usually quieted and relaxed in moments of solitude, it becomes "conjoined" to the presence of others by simply being around them. Affective information (which would give the organism knowledge of a conspecifics intentional state) is picked up unconsciously in facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures and other types of movements. These types of information impel feeling states, especially those that occur most often and most often dissociated from: shame, or 'awardness', 'insecurity'; affects that are ubiquitous in relations, yet not spoken of, perhaps, not surprisingly, due to a secondary shame about their constant presence. What else is narcissism but an overcompensation against the self destroying affects of shame?
Shame is often regarded by emotion theorists and psychoanalysts as "destroying' the self and as well it should be. If the self is a construction made by a brain BUILT UP from an evolutionary process of deeper phenomenological awareness of the other - or object - than when the primary object, or the activity of another self, expresses disapproval, naturally, the self as "self-object" falls apart because the object is looking upon the self with disapproval. This could hardly be harder evidence that the self was made in the furnace of interaction - communication - and that the affects we feel from moment to moment are the 'carrots' and 'sticks' that promote Tomasello's shared intentionality in the evolutionary process.
Human minds are also dissociative, which gives us a microscope into the nature and purpose of moment-to-moment phenomenology.
Trauma breaks a part the mind simply because cortisol has neurotoxic effects on neurons. In a state of trauma, the neurons involved with working memory (hippocampus and surrounding structures) are damaged, which phenemonologically is experienced as not being able to think clearly or recall aspects of the traumatic event. To offset this neurotoxic effect, the brains periaquaductal grey region releases copious amounts of endogenous opiates, apparently for the purpose of blunting awareness of the 'object' out there in the environment that is causing such stress. The autonomic response to stress of this sort is to decouple the two systems - cognitive and affective - which may be useful in the short term, but long term creates havoc for the personality.
The cerebellum and brain stem seem to play a big part in keeping the affective elements alive in the procedural outputs of nervous system. The body doesn't feel right, which means affects don't feel right, which, if something is known to have gone wrong (the trauma) fills the mind with an endless focus on the negative experience.
Humans have no doubt responded to trauma in different and myriad ways, but I imagine that huddling closer together, and coming "closer to the object" played a significant role in the development and evolution of compassion and love. Pain served love by making awareness of self - and ones own vulnerability - vitally apparent to the organism. The organism then reached out to the other - other humans - as a way to soothe the self and its fears.
Trauma de-couples neurologically because neurons have been damaged and working memory has been deeply dysregulated, paradoxically, because of the continuity of affects that consciousness cannot give meaning to. A normal memory when made works its way from short term areas in the hippocampus, to more widely distributed areas throughout the temporal lobes. Traumatic memory seems not to have made that journey; furthermore, it is lodged in the mind still as affective inputs into ones normal stream of awareness.
I mentioned earlier the "discharge" that animals execute after a traumatic experience. Humans have something similar to this, but, being highly cognitive creatures, our affective systems and homeostatic systems "organize" trauma top-down, by instinct, with reference to the meanings and events we ascribe to it.
When people die, we grieve and mourn them. This process occurs because of a powerful buildup of affects. We cry. We share meaning. We make coherent. The brain, to it's credit, seems more able to 'open up' working memory and store the loss in long term memory following a grieving process of existential reflection.
My studies have brought me to this conclusion. The self, or the thing we think about, as us, is a construction built out of a recursive, positive feedback between individual primate minds taking a bigger and deeper interest in one another. What is this 'bigger and deeper interest'? Michael Tomasellos ideas about shared intentionality, and in particular, his analysis of chimp and human communication in his book 'the origins of human communication' settles the body as the primary locus of cognitive development: chimp and bonobo (our closest genetic relatives) minds are 'built' up from the bottom - from the body; it is not their vocal attempts, but their gestural actions, that indicate the presence of a cognitive creature.
Tomasello and the other evolutionary psychologists (scientists and philosophers) I've read are more cognitively oriented, which for me misses a big piece of the puzzle. Tomasello is right about the primacy of the body - and thus in human speech - as the research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson has shown, large chunks of our language are unconscious metaphorical constructions of a metaphorically biased mind. The world makes sense this way because the brain is always organizing and cross-referencing different types of information. The types of creatures that we are - visually dominant with tool like hands - has to integrate different modalities to form a coherent reality. Sounds and vocalizations, pitches, timbers and other acoustic elements, present themselves 'this way or that way'. Take the devils note, the 'tritone' in music. When people hear that we all naturally react in a similar way. High tones are soft, sensuous, and safe. Words like nipple and tip and blip and sip - it isn't a coincide that these sounds share the same theme: smallness. They sound 'small' because it is high and pitchy. In fact, smaller creatures tend to produce a more high pitch sound while large creatures produce lower pitch sounds.
Integration, consolidation, and increased complexity, all have to operate in the service of coherency - homeostasis for the body - but psychologically speaking, a sense of stability for the mind. Evolution maintains a marvelous balance of forces within the body, so it should not be surprising that the mind is similarly organized.
But before I get ahead of myself, let me lay out three principles that I think operate in the evolution of human consciousness. They are aspects of one process, but because of it's nature, it's difficult, not to mention uncommon, for the human mind to be presented this way:
i) Adaptation
ii) Affect Regulation
iii) Coherency
The first idea is basically the working process of biological evolution. The organism at the cellular level is amazingly complexly organized; in multicellular creatures, each cell is exquisitely intertwined with the activity and function of other cells. But it can be hard, and even tempting, to exclude the very consciousness we use from this similar process.
Thankfully, us humans are hardy - and heartful - creatures equipped with tremendous plasticity. The second idea, affect regulation, is basically what the human mind is designed to do. The way we think, we're unconsciously brought to assume that we are the true deciders of our actions; and even worse, we develop philosophies and ideologies that reify certain ideas about the world (and ourselves) that fly in the face of a much sounder reflection.
Affect regulation is the way an organism self organizes in response to environmental threats and attractions. It is basically automatic (Ledoux, Anxious) but also has a basic consciousness component (what it is like to be aroused or distressed) for every creature with a complex nervous system. Negative experiences that hyper-arouse the organism destabilizes neuroendocrinological systems like the HPA axis. An organism needs to return to a normal equilibrium - or psychological 'homeostasis' - after hypo-arousal, and it appears there is a mechanism that follows severe arousal that allows a 'discharge' from an overly aroused procedural motor circuitry. Peter Levine sees this discharge as the "shake" an animal makes after an affectively traumatic experience.
Coherency is a distinctly human concept that is fundamentally related both to the nature of human consciousness, and the process of affect regulation itself.
Imagine Australopithecus, a creature that seems to be man 4 million years ago. Australopithecus already shows a departure from the great ape morphology, but is still very ape like. It's brain is small - chimp like - and so likely was its behavior. However, it was largely arboreal - living on the ground and so needing to become more aware of the threats below it.
Homo Habilis comes along 2.5 million years later and the head is bigger. What happened during this transition, phenomenologically? What engendered this shift?
Theories abound, but I want to consider one related to the communicative process itself. Working from Michael Tomasellos obvious theory (in light of modern traumatology) the shared-intentionality hypothesis, I am interested in the very nature and structure of modern human conscious itself. That is, the two poles which makes up our mind and even gives us the sense of a "self": Self and Object.
Shuffling back to Tomasellos theory about chimp communication, I am intrigued by the way he describes great ape minds as "cognition for competition". Tomasello presents chimps as acting imperatively - that is, for themselves - and when relating with humans, although they begin to learn that humans are benevolently disposed towards them, they nevertheless struggle with interpreting human action as concerned about them. When chimps see you pointing for something, after a while of learning that paying attention to the pointing gesture yields nice rewards (a treat), they begin to respond to a human pointing. But lets say one human drop a treat under a bucket, leaves, and another human comes in and points at the treat. The chimp won't get - doesn't have a working model to support - that the other human is similarly disposed. The chimp doesn't know that the pointing gesture is borne of a a concern that is shared between humans.
It seems the way to get to a steady state of Self-Object consciousness is to build into creatures a disposition towards inquiring about the intentional state of other actors, for their benefit (and also your own!). Tomasello does this by tracing human linguistic communication to gestural communication executed through the body. This is all very cognitive. Interesting, no doubt, but missing out on another sphere of communication - the right brain kind - that 'carries' the narrative-structure of a human life.
Intentional state is the end goal, perhaps, but what is that like on the inside? A gestural action, such as those seen in apes, is very affectively alive. The whole body is in it. In the pointing gesture - something chimps can do - the motion from the body to the object parallels the embodied experience of being a self that wants some thing. The pointing action represents that want, and hence, processes like these, inasmuch as they occur in actors biologically the same, will generate perceptual states that 'converge' on similar phenomenological experiences.
In discussion about human evolution, you seldom here mention of shame. And if it's mentioned, it often seems superficial in its descriptiveness. This is odd, because shame may in fact be - and to me, actually is - the phenomenological condition required to maintain states of "shared-intentionality" between human agents.
From the perspective of the human nervous system, the body can be either aroused via sympathetic, HPA networks mediated by ventral tegmental area, or hypoaroused by parasympathetic networks like the lateral tegmental area (PAG) and the dorsal portion of the vagus nerve. These two, oscillating systems keep the organism affectively alert to threats in the environment. This process is being called 'neuroception', and serves as an unconscious system that organizes object-relations with bodily processes like metabolic homeostasis.
But how does this system operate, phenomenologically? The phenomenology, it must be stated, is at first very passive vis-a-vis environmental input. The brain is very small and very unmyelinated at birth to pass through the cervix. Experiences to come will shape the brain and at the same time will shape subsequent experiences. Good experiences will stand out with particular objects, and likewise negative experiences. Those that occur most commonly will fill-out hyper myelinated circuitry with dense synaptic connectivity. Those that occur less will be 'crowded out' by those that occur most.
What really cements the brain-mind dualism is the process of meaning. Self-Object is the mind of a human being. The human being instinctively builds self with reference to the object. Since the object is essentially other human beings (the source of the self to begin with) the brain is constantly cataloging meanings as it works out a state of coherency. To put this differently, the closed system of the brain needs to 'make psychologically coherent' the various meanings the human organism encounters. This, of course, is a bizarre paradox: the closedness of the brain is BUILT by the openness of the mind; furthermore, the input is the activity of other minds, which our brains, instinctively, self-monitor and imitate as we struggle to make sense of the world around us.
Coherency is the phenomenological process of struggling with the affects that social interaction creates in individual actors. Shame occurs because that's what shared-intentionality required to create minds that cared about one another. Joy, laughter, pleasure - these too are dependent on dyadic interactions: they are emergent properties that follow from the complexities of human meanings.
So back to those old species, those homo's who biased our present brain structure. It bears to point out that not only our cortex, but our amygdala and our upper brain stem are disproportionately large in modern human beings. The biological sociologist Jonathan Turner sees this as a co-evolution between emotional and cognitive processes. So what sort of experiences made this possible?
What about the expanding phenomenology that came with a deeper, more recursive awareness of self and other? Self and other co-evolved, as access to the former follows from access to the latter. When ancient ape-lineages became more interested in one another's knowledge, at some point, the affective program (probably mediated by mirror neurons) referenced the other in constructing a present affect state. How does this happen?
Psychoanalytical and developmental research makes it perfectly clear that right-brain processes 'scaffold' attentional states (contents) that align with the past history and the general needs of an individual human organism. But this is something that is occurring from moment to moment; usually quieted and relaxed in moments of solitude, it becomes "conjoined" to the presence of others by simply being around them. Affective information (which would give the organism knowledge of a conspecifics intentional state) is picked up unconsciously in facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures and other types of movements. These types of information impel feeling states, especially those that occur most often and most often dissociated from: shame, or 'awardness', 'insecurity'; affects that are ubiquitous in relations, yet not spoken of, perhaps, not surprisingly, due to a secondary shame about their constant presence. What else is narcissism but an overcompensation against the self destroying affects of shame?
Shame is often regarded by emotion theorists and psychoanalysts as "destroying' the self and as well it should be. If the self is a construction made by a brain BUILT UP from an evolutionary process of deeper phenomenological awareness of the other - or object - than when the primary object, or the activity of another self, expresses disapproval, naturally, the self as "self-object" falls apart because the object is looking upon the self with disapproval. This could hardly be harder evidence that the self was made in the furnace of interaction - communication - and that the affects we feel from moment to moment are the 'carrots' and 'sticks' that promote Tomasello's shared intentionality in the evolutionary process.
Human minds are also dissociative, which gives us a microscope into the nature and purpose of moment-to-moment phenomenology.
Trauma breaks a part the mind simply because cortisol has neurotoxic effects on neurons. In a state of trauma, the neurons involved with working memory (hippocampus and surrounding structures) are damaged, which phenemonologically is experienced as not being able to think clearly or recall aspects of the traumatic event. To offset this neurotoxic effect, the brains periaquaductal grey region releases copious amounts of endogenous opiates, apparently for the purpose of blunting awareness of the 'object' out there in the environment that is causing such stress. The autonomic response to stress of this sort is to decouple the two systems - cognitive and affective - which may be useful in the short term, but long term creates havoc for the personality.
The cerebellum and brain stem seem to play a big part in keeping the affective elements alive in the procedural outputs of nervous system. The body doesn't feel right, which means affects don't feel right, which, if something is known to have gone wrong (the trauma) fills the mind with an endless focus on the negative experience.
Humans have no doubt responded to trauma in different and myriad ways, but I imagine that huddling closer together, and coming "closer to the object" played a significant role in the development and evolution of compassion and love. Pain served love by making awareness of self - and ones own vulnerability - vitally apparent to the organism. The organism then reached out to the other - other humans - as a way to soothe the self and its fears.
Trauma de-couples neurologically because neurons have been damaged and working memory has been deeply dysregulated, paradoxically, because of the continuity of affects that consciousness cannot give meaning to. A normal memory when made works its way from short term areas in the hippocampus, to more widely distributed areas throughout the temporal lobes. Traumatic memory seems not to have made that journey; furthermore, it is lodged in the mind still as affective inputs into ones normal stream of awareness.
I mentioned earlier the "discharge" that animals execute after a traumatic experience. Humans have something similar to this, but, being highly cognitive creatures, our affective systems and homeostatic systems "organize" trauma top-down, by instinct, with reference to the meanings and events we ascribe to it.
When people die, we grieve and mourn them. This process occurs because of a powerful buildup of affects. We cry. We share meaning. We make coherent. The brain, to it's credit, seems more able to 'open up' working memory and store the loss in long term memory following a grieving process of existential reflection.
Thursday, 20 August 2015
BIID:Body Integrity Identity Disorder
As recently presented in the book "The Man Who Wasn't There" by Anil Ananthaswamy, is not real.
First, let me explain by "not real". We got to go down a philosophical pathway first and note a distinction between two types of pathology. There are pathology's (or diseases) that are genetic and exhibit irreversibility. And then there are diseases that exist because of some underlying condition that the person isn't aware of (i.e blood pressure, diet, stress) that can otherwise be changed.
Anil Anathaswamy and others who claim that BIID is a "neurological disorder" and thus requires a medical treatment (removal of the body part the person wants to remove) are advocating what seems to me to be an insanely extreme position - and ironically enough (from an Indian writer) Anathaswamy doesn't seem to recognize the influence MIND - that is, how the experiences human beings have in their everyday interactions with other human beings can influence the neurobiology of the brain and the homeostatic balance between "self in relation" (the states we enact when we communicate with others) which is situated in the frontal and dorsal temporal areas, and the areas of the brain stem which regulate homeostatic processes (i.e the various factors influencing blood flow, breathing, etc) - can have on the body; and, I might add, ones sense of relation towards a body part is not at all different from the other ways the mind can go wrong.
Lets explore some of these other ways: anorexia nervosa, spasmodic dysphonia and gender dysmorphia
The first one is a disorder of how someone experiences their own body. The cause, of course, is the overwhelming influence (as experienced by the anorexic) of the significance society ascribes to body image. Causally speaking, some aspect in the anorexic's early relational environment (as between mother and her, father and her, individual siblings and her, and the emergent properties at higher levels) makes her vulnerable to succumbing to the influence society places on body image. I want to make clear that I am speaking probabilistically: when certain combinations of relational circumstances come together (say a gene for being high reactive and a mother who yells and screams) the likelihood of a certain phenotype (or consequence in behavior) is made either high or low.
Anytime anorexia appears, it can be said to have these certain relational conditions "scaffolding" the appearance of the phenomena in question. The end phenomenological (or the psychologically experienced) state is the sensation that ones body looks fat. I don't know what that's like and neither do you: it requires the presence of certain preconditions to 'make apparent' the "reality" that one is overweight, even though one may in fact be desperately underweight.
The second condition is one I myself once dealt with. I suffered a severe relational trauma at 13 which occurred again at 15 and 16. The result was post-traumatic stress disorder which, since it was caused by bullying, is better described as "developmental trauma", also known by other theorists as "complex trauma".
The issue of psychological or emotional trauma is perhaps best understood in terms of energy flow through the nervous system. Our nervous system is built to process a certain rate of information. When were relaxed and yet focused - a necessary mental state for effective socializing - information passes between humans with very high fidelity. On the other hand, when we feel threatened, our brain switches from what the neurophysiologist Stephen Porges calls the "social engagement system" to the "fight-flight" system. In neuroendrincology, this system is better known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
Whenever were shocked into defensive reaction, our brain releases a chemical from the hypothalamus (CRH) which causes the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropin into the blood stream; this then causes the adrenal glands (which sit atop the kidneys) to release adrenaline and cortisol. Cortisol, in turn, breaks down glucose which is then used to power mitochondria in cells; cell activity for the energy required to mount an effective defense response. This is basically what's happening when were "stressed" by the world.
When being bullied, I realized early on that I couldn't speak. What I heard whenever I attempted to speak was the presence of anxiety; an unconscious effort, compulsively enacted, to 'fix', or control, or do something that would make the bullying end. Repetition. The longer the threat lasts, the more consequential the effects on brain cells and the architecture of inter-cellular activity. Eventually, you brought to a state of mind of compulsive alertness to the now generalized relational threat: alert to the cues of others, in face, voice, of movement, that indicates disapproval. I found myself operating as if 'from without', seeing myself as a "shameful object", deserving disdain; the external viewpoint is what happens under relational trauma; the other party, the other perspective, begins to dominate your attention. In evolutionary logic, this is precisely what we should expect from examples in lower phyla: organisms adapt by modifying their internal organization. In complex multicellular organisms, these changes are coordinated to correspond to the information coming in from the visual system. Such as running away, fighting, or freezing when the two other responses aren't available or aren't possible. This, also, is basically what the simplest cells do: they pull away from noxious chemicals; likewise, they draw closer to useful chemicals.
Spasmodic Dyphonia is the belief that the raspy, stressful effort to speak is caused by an unrecognized neurological disorder; I, as well as many other psychologists and neuroscientists (such as Robert Scaer) believe a "disease" such as this is a consequence of relational trauma that occurred in the early years of development. I see early years because the belief that spasmodic dysphonia is a real thing (brain, or even larynx related) gains its force from a lack of episodic memory to make sense of it's presence. Because I suffered bullying, I know the contexts that brought this state out of me. Neurologically, the voice - the organ that felt the stress when one felt the need to protest the abuse - remains tentative and withdrawn.
Should we infer from a brain scan that the brain is causing a voice issue? Or should we instead trace the dots backwards and recognize the obvious contingency between social reality and the effect it can cause in neurobiology.
Finally, lets get back to body integrity identity disorder, with reference, this time, to what I've explained about the way emotional trauma builds anxiety and over-reactivity into brain processes. This occurs because, again, in a normal evolutionary context, the body is meant to 'burn' off the energy being provided by the stress response system (which, it bears mentioning, is inherited from evolutionary older species); but in our very unusual evolutionary environment, we often find ourselves stuck, in a job, without a context that can help us process our emotions without feeding them through, again and again, as rumination and paranoia about the self and it's world.
Here's an example. Imagine being 3 years old and witnessing a car accident. All around you people are screaming;loud noises all around you activate the stress response system. A women cries for help. Scared, you instinctively turn to where you last saw your mother, but she isn't there. You can't see here. You look and look. You breathe heavy, you start crying, wailing, mommmmmmmmy, wherrreeeee arrrrrrrreeeeee yooooouuuuuu. You quickly turn around and trip on the curb in front of you, you fall down and bang your knee on the cement. Your legs bleeding and you begin to cry harder.
In the brain at these same exact moments, the stress elicited by the context at hand spurred the HPA Axis into activity. It's revolution in the brain, each moment of fear and anxiety, is fed through and magnified from moment to moment. The brain is on maximal "high alert", feeling threatened and enacting a defense behavior that may elicit help attention from helpful adults. In particular, I want to highlight the 'social' parts of the brain as well as the parts that deal with meaning and narrative. "Mommy" is missing, and the loss is felt by the child as terrible: felt with such totality because psychological individuation has yet to happen.
The hitting the knee at the same sequence of time brought into the chorus of activity the area of the sensory cortex that processes knee sensations. The knee - in pain - is being 'incorporated' into a sequence of neurological events that's presently processing an existential sensation of emptiness of self; the mother - the source of identity for a child this age - is missing, and so in a sense, is the child. Hitting the knee brings the 'knee' into the experience of existential absence.
The read psychosomatic disorders exists is perhaps ultimately a manifestation of homeostatic balance. The brain may seek to "unload" certain experiences in different and sometimes anomalous ways. Normally, psychological trauma is processed and the person is able to return to balance without much residue on present functioning. But very often, when the intensity crosses a certain threshold, psychological trauma exerts disastrous effects on consciousness via the deleterious influence of cortisol on neurons. The self is instantly made disordered in some way. For some, it can be the voice (as it was for me); for others, their body (gender dysmorphia). But trauma is apparently very diffusive. A trauma can be 'linked' and contained, as it were, by the fact that a simple thing like a knee bang occurred at the same time one experienced trauma. Just as in other traumatic experiences (this is a science, called 'traumatology') episodic memory is 'deleted' by the power of cortisol, but procedural, or implicit memory, often stays. This is the core feature of post-traumatic stress disorder and there is very good reason to believe that a body part mapped by the brain which was experiencing trauma may 'retain' the existential, embodied sensation of being 'alien' from the body.
This is hard to understand for us because the idea of someone not 'owning' a body part seems strange, so it must, of course, be real, in this day and age of brain science. But we shouldn't rush to such a conclusion when a relational event (trauma) can provide a core 'basis' for the evolution - key word here, the perceptual state of the adult is the not same as the 4 year old, 5 year old, etc; perceptions change as our brain evolves more complex ways of analyzing an experience: for the adults Anathaswamy describes, they spent many years deluding themselves about an experience, which, understandably, they couldn't give narrative sense to (and thus resolve the anxiety: traumatic stress follows because of a lack of episodic clarity,) and thus grew more and more estranged from.
Now, of course, there is the question: so if not amputation, psychotherapy?
Yes psychotherapy. But also, not just any psychotherapy. You need a therapist who can pay attention to the global and systematic effects of interpersonal communicative displays in interaction, and also gain a sense of the individuals history to 'flesh out' out a narrative structure that can go along with this procedural symptom
This, I hope, will one day become a rule in a neurobiologically based psychotherapy: when a person is relating to some aspect of their experience in a dissociated way, assume trauma. As mentioned above, traumatic experiences are recorded differently than normal experiences. Because of the large amounts of circulating cortisol (possibly other stress chemicals as well may have toxic effects on cellular structures) and the particular role the hippocampus and adjacent structures play in 'working memory', what is felt phenomenologically by the traumatized person as 'dissociation', may well be the mental manifestation of neurons being destroyed by too much of a certain chemical.
What does this mean? It means the entire experience as neurologically coded is imperfectly processed. The physiological and affective feelings seem to persist, but without much memory of an event. In particular, I'm thinking of those children who are abused or neglected who fail to develop coherent self-schemas, and thus fail to experience themselves in any normal or healthy way.
Therapy would seek to locate some plausible "building" block from the persons past, and from that past, construct a coherent self narrative that can "take in" and absorb the meanings associated with the body part.
On another note, in this day and age of brain 'mapping', I find it unbelievable that brain scientists don't pay attention to the psychodynamic processes psychoanalysts pay attention to. It's ridiculous. The thoughts and feelings we ascribe to events and the meanings they hold about our past relationships, these are brain events; not only that, as many neuroscientists already acknowledge, a coherent sense of self, a sense of "I know where I am" in one's conceptual self-space, is very important to the whole idea of the self narrative.
Anxiety is tamed when we are able to contextualize or given meanings to our experiences. But when an experience seems nebulous (without an episodic memory) the procedural experience (a sense of numbness, or distance) can generate thoughts that canvass every aspect of the experience, until, over time, a relationship with the body-part has been formed - and also very much 'enbrained' - by countless instances of brooding, ruminating, and suffering from the thoughts and feelings you're having.
I must also stress how unethical it was for Anil Anathaswamy not to pay attention to the difference between psychotherapy's; even more so, to not know about all the progress being made in the field of psychotraumatology, which for example, allows us to study the symptoms of the present (a feeling towards a limb) with reference to catayzing events in the persons relational past.
Lastly, since the self is made in relation, it can only be remade, or remolded, by relationships. Intensive psychotherapy would be the only means to "create" new relational self states as, in terms of systems theory, existing 'ways of being' practiced thousands of times form deeper "troughs" than activities only performed a few times. So, psychotherapy, weekly, can help CREATE A NEW RELATIONSHIP (does the foundationless nature of the mind bother you?) between a person and his affectively infused body part.
But why don't we know this? Enter insurance companies, who want "quick and effective" solutions that work more on 6 week schedules, rather than the more necessary "as long as possible" schedule. This is what skews results.
And on an even more final note, claiming tihs to be a real condition that warrants surgery is a dangerous idea to throw out there, as people, especially anxious people, are liable to be suckered in by the gravity of the statement, and brood upon it, until they too develop the conviction that they have "always felt this way".
The mind is inherently dissociative. Each new revolution of consciousness codes differently, but often follows predictable pathways. At our core is a defensiveness, because dissociation is all about paying attention to things that are relevant to survival; in our abstract minds, this also means ignoring feelings that generate shame or anxiety: homeostasis works 'throughout', physically and psychodynamically.
First, let me explain by "not real". We got to go down a philosophical pathway first and note a distinction between two types of pathology. There are pathology's (or diseases) that are genetic and exhibit irreversibility. And then there are diseases that exist because of some underlying condition that the person isn't aware of (i.e blood pressure, diet, stress) that can otherwise be changed.
Anil Anathaswamy and others who claim that BIID is a "neurological disorder" and thus requires a medical treatment (removal of the body part the person wants to remove) are advocating what seems to me to be an insanely extreme position - and ironically enough (from an Indian writer) Anathaswamy doesn't seem to recognize the influence MIND - that is, how the experiences human beings have in their everyday interactions with other human beings can influence the neurobiology of the brain and the homeostatic balance between "self in relation" (the states we enact when we communicate with others) which is situated in the frontal and dorsal temporal areas, and the areas of the brain stem which regulate homeostatic processes (i.e the various factors influencing blood flow, breathing, etc) - can have on the body; and, I might add, ones sense of relation towards a body part is not at all different from the other ways the mind can go wrong.
Lets explore some of these other ways: anorexia nervosa, spasmodic dysphonia and gender dysmorphia
The first one is a disorder of how someone experiences their own body. The cause, of course, is the overwhelming influence (as experienced by the anorexic) of the significance society ascribes to body image. Causally speaking, some aspect in the anorexic's early relational environment (as between mother and her, father and her, individual siblings and her, and the emergent properties at higher levels) makes her vulnerable to succumbing to the influence society places on body image. I want to make clear that I am speaking probabilistically: when certain combinations of relational circumstances come together (say a gene for being high reactive and a mother who yells and screams) the likelihood of a certain phenotype (or consequence in behavior) is made either high or low.
Anytime anorexia appears, it can be said to have these certain relational conditions "scaffolding" the appearance of the phenomena in question. The end phenomenological (or the psychologically experienced) state is the sensation that ones body looks fat. I don't know what that's like and neither do you: it requires the presence of certain preconditions to 'make apparent' the "reality" that one is overweight, even though one may in fact be desperately underweight.
The second condition is one I myself once dealt with. I suffered a severe relational trauma at 13 which occurred again at 15 and 16. The result was post-traumatic stress disorder which, since it was caused by bullying, is better described as "developmental trauma", also known by other theorists as "complex trauma".
The issue of psychological or emotional trauma is perhaps best understood in terms of energy flow through the nervous system. Our nervous system is built to process a certain rate of information. When were relaxed and yet focused - a necessary mental state for effective socializing - information passes between humans with very high fidelity. On the other hand, when we feel threatened, our brain switches from what the neurophysiologist Stephen Porges calls the "social engagement system" to the "fight-flight" system. In neuroendrincology, this system is better known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
Whenever were shocked into defensive reaction, our brain releases a chemical from the hypothalamus (CRH) which causes the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropin into the blood stream; this then causes the adrenal glands (which sit atop the kidneys) to release adrenaline and cortisol. Cortisol, in turn, breaks down glucose which is then used to power mitochondria in cells; cell activity for the energy required to mount an effective defense response. This is basically what's happening when were "stressed" by the world.
When being bullied, I realized early on that I couldn't speak. What I heard whenever I attempted to speak was the presence of anxiety; an unconscious effort, compulsively enacted, to 'fix', or control, or do something that would make the bullying end. Repetition. The longer the threat lasts, the more consequential the effects on brain cells and the architecture of inter-cellular activity. Eventually, you brought to a state of mind of compulsive alertness to the now generalized relational threat: alert to the cues of others, in face, voice, of movement, that indicates disapproval. I found myself operating as if 'from without', seeing myself as a "shameful object", deserving disdain; the external viewpoint is what happens under relational trauma; the other party, the other perspective, begins to dominate your attention. In evolutionary logic, this is precisely what we should expect from examples in lower phyla: organisms adapt by modifying their internal organization. In complex multicellular organisms, these changes are coordinated to correspond to the information coming in from the visual system. Such as running away, fighting, or freezing when the two other responses aren't available or aren't possible. This, also, is basically what the simplest cells do: they pull away from noxious chemicals; likewise, they draw closer to useful chemicals.
Spasmodic Dyphonia is the belief that the raspy, stressful effort to speak is caused by an unrecognized neurological disorder; I, as well as many other psychologists and neuroscientists (such as Robert Scaer) believe a "disease" such as this is a consequence of relational trauma that occurred in the early years of development. I see early years because the belief that spasmodic dysphonia is a real thing (brain, or even larynx related) gains its force from a lack of episodic memory to make sense of it's presence. Because I suffered bullying, I know the contexts that brought this state out of me. Neurologically, the voice - the organ that felt the stress when one felt the need to protest the abuse - remains tentative and withdrawn.
Should we infer from a brain scan that the brain is causing a voice issue? Or should we instead trace the dots backwards and recognize the obvious contingency between social reality and the effect it can cause in neurobiology.
Finally, lets get back to body integrity identity disorder, with reference, this time, to what I've explained about the way emotional trauma builds anxiety and over-reactivity into brain processes. This occurs because, again, in a normal evolutionary context, the body is meant to 'burn' off the energy being provided by the stress response system (which, it bears mentioning, is inherited from evolutionary older species); but in our very unusual evolutionary environment, we often find ourselves stuck, in a job, without a context that can help us process our emotions without feeding them through, again and again, as rumination and paranoia about the self and it's world.
Here's an example. Imagine being 3 years old and witnessing a car accident. All around you people are screaming;loud noises all around you activate the stress response system. A women cries for help. Scared, you instinctively turn to where you last saw your mother, but she isn't there. You can't see here. You look and look. You breathe heavy, you start crying, wailing, mommmmmmmmy, wherrreeeee arrrrrrrreeeeee yooooouuuuuu. You quickly turn around and trip on the curb in front of you, you fall down and bang your knee on the cement. Your legs bleeding and you begin to cry harder.
In the brain at these same exact moments, the stress elicited by the context at hand spurred the HPA Axis into activity. It's revolution in the brain, each moment of fear and anxiety, is fed through and magnified from moment to moment. The brain is on maximal "high alert", feeling threatened and enacting a defense behavior that may elicit help attention from helpful adults. In particular, I want to highlight the 'social' parts of the brain as well as the parts that deal with meaning and narrative. "Mommy" is missing, and the loss is felt by the child as terrible: felt with such totality because psychological individuation has yet to happen.
The hitting the knee at the same sequence of time brought into the chorus of activity the area of the sensory cortex that processes knee sensations. The knee - in pain - is being 'incorporated' into a sequence of neurological events that's presently processing an existential sensation of emptiness of self; the mother - the source of identity for a child this age - is missing, and so in a sense, is the child. Hitting the knee brings the 'knee' into the experience of existential absence.
The read psychosomatic disorders exists is perhaps ultimately a manifestation of homeostatic balance. The brain may seek to "unload" certain experiences in different and sometimes anomalous ways. Normally, psychological trauma is processed and the person is able to return to balance without much residue on present functioning. But very often, when the intensity crosses a certain threshold, psychological trauma exerts disastrous effects on consciousness via the deleterious influence of cortisol on neurons. The self is instantly made disordered in some way. For some, it can be the voice (as it was for me); for others, their body (gender dysmorphia). But trauma is apparently very diffusive. A trauma can be 'linked' and contained, as it were, by the fact that a simple thing like a knee bang occurred at the same time one experienced trauma. Just as in other traumatic experiences (this is a science, called 'traumatology') episodic memory is 'deleted' by the power of cortisol, but procedural, or implicit memory, often stays. This is the core feature of post-traumatic stress disorder and there is very good reason to believe that a body part mapped by the brain which was experiencing trauma may 'retain' the existential, embodied sensation of being 'alien' from the body.
This is hard to understand for us because the idea of someone not 'owning' a body part seems strange, so it must, of course, be real, in this day and age of brain science. But we shouldn't rush to such a conclusion when a relational event (trauma) can provide a core 'basis' for the evolution - key word here, the perceptual state of the adult is the not same as the 4 year old, 5 year old, etc; perceptions change as our brain evolves more complex ways of analyzing an experience: for the adults Anathaswamy describes, they spent many years deluding themselves about an experience, which, understandably, they couldn't give narrative sense to (and thus resolve the anxiety: traumatic stress follows because of a lack of episodic clarity,) and thus grew more and more estranged from.
Now, of course, there is the question: so if not amputation, psychotherapy?
Yes psychotherapy. But also, not just any psychotherapy. You need a therapist who can pay attention to the global and systematic effects of interpersonal communicative displays in interaction, and also gain a sense of the individuals history to 'flesh out' out a narrative structure that can go along with this procedural symptom
This, I hope, will one day become a rule in a neurobiologically based psychotherapy: when a person is relating to some aspect of their experience in a dissociated way, assume trauma. As mentioned above, traumatic experiences are recorded differently than normal experiences. Because of the large amounts of circulating cortisol (possibly other stress chemicals as well may have toxic effects on cellular structures) and the particular role the hippocampus and adjacent structures play in 'working memory', what is felt phenomenologically by the traumatized person as 'dissociation', may well be the mental manifestation of neurons being destroyed by too much of a certain chemical.
What does this mean? It means the entire experience as neurologically coded is imperfectly processed. The physiological and affective feelings seem to persist, but without much memory of an event. In particular, I'm thinking of those children who are abused or neglected who fail to develop coherent self-schemas, and thus fail to experience themselves in any normal or healthy way.
Therapy would seek to locate some plausible "building" block from the persons past, and from that past, construct a coherent self narrative that can "take in" and absorb the meanings associated with the body part.
On another note, in this day and age of brain 'mapping', I find it unbelievable that brain scientists don't pay attention to the psychodynamic processes psychoanalysts pay attention to. It's ridiculous. The thoughts and feelings we ascribe to events and the meanings they hold about our past relationships, these are brain events; not only that, as many neuroscientists already acknowledge, a coherent sense of self, a sense of "I know where I am" in one's conceptual self-space, is very important to the whole idea of the self narrative.
Anxiety is tamed when we are able to contextualize or given meanings to our experiences. But when an experience seems nebulous (without an episodic memory) the procedural experience (a sense of numbness, or distance) can generate thoughts that canvass every aspect of the experience, until, over time, a relationship with the body-part has been formed - and also very much 'enbrained' - by countless instances of brooding, ruminating, and suffering from the thoughts and feelings you're having.
I must also stress how unethical it was for Anil Anathaswamy not to pay attention to the difference between psychotherapy's; even more so, to not know about all the progress being made in the field of psychotraumatology, which for example, allows us to study the symptoms of the present (a feeling towards a limb) with reference to catayzing events in the persons relational past.
Lastly, since the self is made in relation, it can only be remade, or remolded, by relationships. Intensive psychotherapy would be the only means to "create" new relational self states as, in terms of systems theory, existing 'ways of being' practiced thousands of times form deeper "troughs" than activities only performed a few times. So, psychotherapy, weekly, can help CREATE A NEW RELATIONSHIP (does the foundationless nature of the mind bother you?) between a person and his affectively infused body part.
But why don't we know this? Enter insurance companies, who want "quick and effective" solutions that work more on 6 week schedules, rather than the more necessary "as long as possible" schedule. This is what skews results.
And on an even more final note, claiming tihs to be a real condition that warrants surgery is a dangerous idea to throw out there, as people, especially anxious people, are liable to be suckered in by the gravity of the statement, and brood upon it, until they too develop the conviction that they have "always felt this way".
The mind is inherently dissociative. Each new revolution of consciousness codes differently, but often follows predictable pathways. At our core is a defensiveness, because dissociation is all about paying attention to things that are relevant to survival; in our abstract minds, this also means ignoring feelings that generate shame or anxiety: homeostasis works 'throughout', physically and psychodynamically.
Wednesday, 10 June 2015
suffering
I am an addict. To marijuana.
Marijuana feels nice. I can't explain why that is - it just is - a stubborn annoying fact of reality.
But living with complex developmental trauma is so complicated. I was addicted to this blasted drug before I understood what it meant, psychoanalytically, that I was ding to myself.
The weed is dissociating me from any strong investment in my experience. I act, but I have this strange sense that something isn't right. My body feels too numb. I feel psychically "split", acting and wanting to act, but not liking what I'm experiencing as I act. I begin to 'hyper-focus', my mind becomes singularly focused - an ability that becomes enhanced by the dissociative, "momentary" cognition of a weed high - on the bad, on whats wrong, oftentimes is being enhanced by my brother.
In a very real way, my poor brother and I have been living within a sadomasochistic relationship, each moving from abuser to abused, I forcing him to do what I want - basically subverting his subjectivity and sense of agency - and he, stubborn, frustrated, and lockjawed in dissociation, just looks at me blankly, until I demand in a more harsher tone that he tell me what I want to hear.
Our relationship was scaffolded by my mothers relationship with me and him. No one here is to blame. Blame means nothing when every human being passes through a stage of developmental passivity, taking in what the environment gives you: every one of us is the "imprint" of the environment around us.
I felt my mother favored him. Loved him more. Liked him more. This is what happens, at my young age - 5 years and 7 months at his birth - that I detested him and his entrance into the world. Why so much hate? My mother, a conflicted, quiet, sometimes depressed, sometimes anxious, irritable and angry woman, brought me inside her emotional reality. She was disturbed, and till this day retains much of her disturbances. She was hurt in ways far greater than me, yet she was also "made" differently, at a different time, a different family/group of people, and these elements come together to "make" you what you are.
But evidently, how I am and how I experience myself is nothing more than my interpretation of her emotional reality. I am needy; fearful, anxious, depressive and angry at different times. All these affects are things she feels from time to time; but she cannot "know it", self consciously, conceptually and theoretically, as an important and useful piece of knowledge. For whatever reason, I have come to know these things in myself, uniquely mine, yet originating in a pattern borne from her, and to a lesser extent, my father.
Jordan came in, to the rescue, a beautiful, healthy, and heavy baby boy. He eventually developed into quite a splendid human adult phenotype. Clear skin. Wavy hair. 5'9. Really, a good looking kid. And gregarious, always curious to know from the people around him. I always resented seeing this in him, because I knew it wasn't something I could find inside me. Hatred grows from these types of experiences.
I tried so hard to keep him down, but his natural resilience made him a naturally skilled dissociater. He dissociated in the "normative" sense of being good at not feeling bad emotions. His "self regulation", made easy by his genetic-epigeneitic milieu, gave him a natural likeability. A sincerity in his speech. The base, or speech, I suppose has a keeness to it that could make someone, usually girls, to find it 'cute'.
I was forced to experience again and again in our relationship his obdurate unwillingness to know what he was experiencing.And for good reason! Evolutionarily speaking, Jordan is a "successful reproducer" - he can adapt himself to different contexts with ease. But with me, he held a steady quietness for long periods as I vented my anxieties to him, about what was wrong, in our relationship. Besides that, there were the innumerable fights. Most, if not all of them instigated by me.
Today, when I relate with him, particularly potent at those times where I've been smoking weed for a few days straight, I dissociate, and I experience this horribly unresponsive, at ease, yet easily defensive face, and body posture, and I find myself being "sucked" into that past traumatic wormhole, a literal vector of relational traumata, in which I experience again and again the painful feeling of not being recognized nicely by the other person.
I wonder where that neediness originated. Oh yes, my mother. So great, mysterious, and yet arbitrary it all is, who gives birth to us, where and at what time. It all follows like a canal, cute little baby morphs into cute yet shy 5 year old who morphs into socially awkward 16 year old who morphs into self-educated 29 year old. All of the past, the cute innocence of needing recognition of my infancy, to the social awkwardness of my 16-29 year old self. I say -29, because I have not yet quite outgrown that. Healing requires quite an intense, conscious "midwifing" of negative experiences, finding the compassion within you to reorganize, find help, and build yourself again through positive interaction. And don't be afraid to bare yourself: let your needs be seen, unload them, so that the other can recognize its similarity to their own experience.
I trust I don't live in a crazy world, and that human beings can be willing to conquer the fears which cripple us. But that can only be done through understanding the social origin of these very personal experiences of shame and self-hatred. In short, the challenges that face us our interpersonal: how do we handle the "effects" of our actions on the world? By paying attention. When something goes wrong - when it's recognized, do not dissociate it and pretend like you didn't have the initial perception. Getting better at being good means knowing the effects your having and desiring to engender a positive effect. If the desire is there, good. But most people don't really have the desire there. It's there, as they say, as a "Self-state": it's only you at those moments when you feel compassion, kindness, empathy, or that you've done something morally upright. At other times you firmly identify with other emotions/self-states, and don't realize how completely out-of-line you are with your stated, self conscious values.
Suffering makes you aware by truly forcing you to thinking in a new way. Fortunately for me, I have relational psychoanalysis, interpersonal neurobiology, enactive cognitive science and other ways to "scaffold" my understanding of how to think. But it is mainly the influence of suffering, of feeling and knowing fear and shame, that I somehow find a part in me that is loving; sometimes projected outwards as a call to God; other times related inwardly as an inner capacity, borne from the strain of the suffering on my body's survival.
So why I am the way I am, is a mystery to me. It has given life deep existential meaning, made more meaningful my mere consciousness of it. It's not just me, but all of us, our species, the process of life, in an expanding universe; the culture and technologies we develop, predictions for the future, hopes for the future, the potential for spiritual development, at the same time as we develop our material technologies.
This perception "scaffolds" my experience at those moments when I feel "above" the petty power politics of everyday socializing. I can be myself without feeling the force of the "object". My brain 'contains' various experiences, different selves, and their actions are determined by emotional valence. Which emotions cause what? How do I make myself more able to tolerate negative experiences?
How do I get myself away from marijuana? Do I not wait up for Jordan when he comes home? Not call him? These are habits and desires which form strongly in me at around 5 or 6 pm. The rest of the day seems monotonous vis-a-vis the notion of Jordan coming home, smoking weed, with around a 50/50 chance of a negative high, and the negative self-states that come with that. I think that's what I'll need o do. I can perhaps tolerate getting high on Mondays. But not anymore. I must, MUST, must, go to bed before he comes home. When home, hang out with him soberly, both literally and figuratively, and disengage at the right time to go to bed. You're going to school anyways very soon. You need to prepare yourself - enjoy your summer, spend more time meditating, read, play basketball, read, hang out with the family and then a little more reading, than bed. That's a good, productive day.
Marijuana feels nice. I can't explain why that is - it just is - a stubborn annoying fact of reality.
But living with complex developmental trauma is so complicated. I was addicted to this blasted drug before I understood what it meant, psychoanalytically, that I was ding to myself.
The weed is dissociating me from any strong investment in my experience. I act, but I have this strange sense that something isn't right. My body feels too numb. I feel psychically "split", acting and wanting to act, but not liking what I'm experiencing as I act. I begin to 'hyper-focus', my mind becomes singularly focused - an ability that becomes enhanced by the dissociative, "momentary" cognition of a weed high - on the bad, on whats wrong, oftentimes is being enhanced by my brother.
In a very real way, my poor brother and I have been living within a sadomasochistic relationship, each moving from abuser to abused, I forcing him to do what I want - basically subverting his subjectivity and sense of agency - and he, stubborn, frustrated, and lockjawed in dissociation, just looks at me blankly, until I demand in a more harsher tone that he tell me what I want to hear.
Our relationship was scaffolded by my mothers relationship with me and him. No one here is to blame. Blame means nothing when every human being passes through a stage of developmental passivity, taking in what the environment gives you: every one of us is the "imprint" of the environment around us.
I felt my mother favored him. Loved him more. Liked him more. This is what happens, at my young age - 5 years and 7 months at his birth - that I detested him and his entrance into the world. Why so much hate? My mother, a conflicted, quiet, sometimes depressed, sometimes anxious, irritable and angry woman, brought me inside her emotional reality. She was disturbed, and till this day retains much of her disturbances. She was hurt in ways far greater than me, yet she was also "made" differently, at a different time, a different family/group of people, and these elements come together to "make" you what you are.
But evidently, how I am and how I experience myself is nothing more than my interpretation of her emotional reality. I am needy; fearful, anxious, depressive and angry at different times. All these affects are things she feels from time to time; but she cannot "know it", self consciously, conceptually and theoretically, as an important and useful piece of knowledge. For whatever reason, I have come to know these things in myself, uniquely mine, yet originating in a pattern borne from her, and to a lesser extent, my father.
Jordan came in, to the rescue, a beautiful, healthy, and heavy baby boy. He eventually developed into quite a splendid human adult phenotype. Clear skin. Wavy hair. 5'9. Really, a good looking kid. And gregarious, always curious to know from the people around him. I always resented seeing this in him, because I knew it wasn't something I could find inside me. Hatred grows from these types of experiences.
I tried so hard to keep him down, but his natural resilience made him a naturally skilled dissociater. He dissociated in the "normative" sense of being good at not feeling bad emotions. His "self regulation", made easy by his genetic-epigeneitic milieu, gave him a natural likeability. A sincerity in his speech. The base, or speech, I suppose has a keeness to it that could make someone, usually girls, to find it 'cute'.
I was forced to experience again and again in our relationship his obdurate unwillingness to know what he was experiencing.And for good reason! Evolutionarily speaking, Jordan is a "successful reproducer" - he can adapt himself to different contexts with ease. But with me, he held a steady quietness for long periods as I vented my anxieties to him, about what was wrong, in our relationship. Besides that, there were the innumerable fights. Most, if not all of them instigated by me.
Today, when I relate with him, particularly potent at those times where I've been smoking weed for a few days straight, I dissociate, and I experience this horribly unresponsive, at ease, yet easily defensive face, and body posture, and I find myself being "sucked" into that past traumatic wormhole, a literal vector of relational traumata, in which I experience again and again the painful feeling of not being recognized nicely by the other person.
I wonder where that neediness originated. Oh yes, my mother. So great, mysterious, and yet arbitrary it all is, who gives birth to us, where and at what time. It all follows like a canal, cute little baby morphs into cute yet shy 5 year old who morphs into socially awkward 16 year old who morphs into self-educated 29 year old. All of the past, the cute innocence of needing recognition of my infancy, to the social awkwardness of my 16-29 year old self. I say -29, because I have not yet quite outgrown that. Healing requires quite an intense, conscious "midwifing" of negative experiences, finding the compassion within you to reorganize, find help, and build yourself again through positive interaction. And don't be afraid to bare yourself: let your needs be seen, unload them, so that the other can recognize its similarity to their own experience.
I trust I don't live in a crazy world, and that human beings can be willing to conquer the fears which cripple us. But that can only be done through understanding the social origin of these very personal experiences of shame and self-hatred. In short, the challenges that face us our interpersonal: how do we handle the "effects" of our actions on the world? By paying attention. When something goes wrong - when it's recognized, do not dissociate it and pretend like you didn't have the initial perception. Getting better at being good means knowing the effects your having and desiring to engender a positive effect. If the desire is there, good. But most people don't really have the desire there. It's there, as they say, as a "Self-state": it's only you at those moments when you feel compassion, kindness, empathy, or that you've done something morally upright. At other times you firmly identify with other emotions/self-states, and don't realize how completely out-of-line you are with your stated, self conscious values.
Suffering makes you aware by truly forcing you to thinking in a new way. Fortunately for me, I have relational psychoanalysis, interpersonal neurobiology, enactive cognitive science and other ways to "scaffold" my understanding of how to think. But it is mainly the influence of suffering, of feeling and knowing fear and shame, that I somehow find a part in me that is loving; sometimes projected outwards as a call to God; other times related inwardly as an inner capacity, borne from the strain of the suffering on my body's survival.
So why I am the way I am, is a mystery to me. It has given life deep existential meaning, made more meaningful my mere consciousness of it. It's not just me, but all of us, our species, the process of life, in an expanding universe; the culture and technologies we develop, predictions for the future, hopes for the future, the potential for spiritual development, at the same time as we develop our material technologies.
This perception "scaffolds" my experience at those moments when I feel "above" the petty power politics of everyday socializing. I can be myself without feeling the force of the "object". My brain 'contains' various experiences, different selves, and their actions are determined by emotional valence. Which emotions cause what? How do I make myself more able to tolerate negative experiences?
How do I get myself away from marijuana? Do I not wait up for Jordan when he comes home? Not call him? These are habits and desires which form strongly in me at around 5 or 6 pm. The rest of the day seems monotonous vis-a-vis the notion of Jordan coming home, smoking weed, with around a 50/50 chance of a negative high, and the negative self-states that come with that. I think that's what I'll need o do. I can perhaps tolerate getting high on Mondays. But not anymore. I must, MUST, must, go to bed before he comes home. When home, hang out with him soberly, both literally and figuratively, and disengage at the right time to go to bed. You're going to school anyways very soon. You need to prepare yourself - enjoy your summer, spend more time meditating, read, play basketball, read, hang out with the family and then a little more reading, than bed. That's a good, productive day.
Monday, 8 June 2015
Still Searching
I need to understand why things like this keep happening. I shouldn't smoke weed, yet I do it. The glory and blissful like feeling with another - the want - supersedes my wiser, better self. I can have so much fun articulating ideas like these, yet enacting them, controlling the dynamics of experience, intervening at proper times, changing the flow of experience so that you don't allow yourself to fall into certain basins of attraction - this stuffs hard, difficult to tolerate: the instinct, deep within your chest, is to dissociate the pain of not getting what you want.
I can't remember how it began. I know the weed was making me paranoid and feeling negative. An "absence" in me, noticed peripherally at first, periodically 'jutted' into my attention. Talking about philosophical matters made me more self-consciousness. Each iteration, or effort to explain a feeling I was having, lead to this overbearing self consciousness, felt in the action itself, impinging on a more natural focus on what I was talking about. Feeling that, reading the effect on Jordan, silenced any strong or resilient part in me, and drew me to deeper into psychic entrainment with a negative self-state.
When we left, went to get his car clean, I was sitting in the car, thinking, worrying, feeling a 'weight' upon me - the weighing paranoia of "hearing a voice", a paranoia from a more paranoid time in my past - I didn't know that he was noticing "micro-scratches" from the brush he used to clean it. He came back in, I spoke, he didn't respond in a way that I liked. Every repetition of this effort - the intention I had to speak, and the perceived effect I seemed to be having, left marks on my physiology, an increased heat in my forehead, a feeling of compression, or perhaps decomprehension: is the blood rushing in, or away, from my frontal lobe? My attention and quality of consciousness would seem to indicate a reduction in orbitofrontal control. I gave up, psychically, and I remember the few iterations where it happened: I remember internalizing a feeling, and not having the "oomph" to contain and defuse it. It was a feeling that consciously said "I give up", and so every action became increasingly lifeless, self-conscious, guarded, tense, and rushed. This anxiety "scaffolded" what was allowed to come through in my action. My perception "knew it", WAS IT, and I have the simultaneous shame of having another person partake in this quality of experience, engendered by me and "put" into you.
No wonder people hate shame. Shame-Hate might in fact be psychical twins - neurological actions that become neurally 'linked' by inherent properties in social and emotion relations. A human can't help but naturally hate shame. On the other hand, there is another part of you: a part that can be so quiet that your stubborn intention is to dilute it's presence. Love, compassion, acceptance, tolerance. The blissful feeling, lightness and ease of patient acceptance of what is. Anger, in it's stubborness and arrogance, is symptomatic of a mind overwhelmed by shame and defends against it through projecting on an external object. Through externalizing, it displaces and thus distorts the influence of unconscious processes in social relations. Ignorance of processes like these is the root cause of pain and suffering human society.
There a comes a point in every self-conscious human beings life when he honestly addresses what he feels: his fears, his deep, naked, vulnerability before the facts of life. He looks at it, acknowledges what he sees, but instead of identifying, and thus inevitably enacting what he feels, he instead chooses - exercises a capacity that no other creature possesses: affirmation, in an action, in a choice, he decides to love himself, forgive himself, calm himself, and make new promises, and commitments, to a newer understanding. My perceptions have the dimensions of a sphere. I can see so far - I cannot see what lies beyond the horizon. The curvature of perception, like that of the earth, inhibits knowledge of what lies beyond. But we know, always, that what lies beyond is different than what is here. In the next perception, we can know, breathe, and cool the fires in our belly's. Life feels better. Your mind feels stronger. You can trust yourself to be yourself. Not as performance. Not for anyone, but for you, because you feel it, and you should defend what you feel: to be, and to let yourself to be, is the core processes at the root of "selfhood".
I can't remember how it began. I know the weed was making me paranoid and feeling negative. An "absence" in me, noticed peripherally at first, periodically 'jutted' into my attention. Talking about philosophical matters made me more self-consciousness. Each iteration, or effort to explain a feeling I was having, lead to this overbearing self consciousness, felt in the action itself, impinging on a more natural focus on what I was talking about. Feeling that, reading the effect on Jordan, silenced any strong or resilient part in me, and drew me to deeper into psychic entrainment with a negative self-state.
When we left, went to get his car clean, I was sitting in the car, thinking, worrying, feeling a 'weight' upon me - the weighing paranoia of "hearing a voice", a paranoia from a more paranoid time in my past - I didn't know that he was noticing "micro-scratches" from the brush he used to clean it. He came back in, I spoke, he didn't respond in a way that I liked. Every repetition of this effort - the intention I had to speak, and the perceived effect I seemed to be having, left marks on my physiology, an increased heat in my forehead, a feeling of compression, or perhaps decomprehension: is the blood rushing in, or away, from my frontal lobe? My attention and quality of consciousness would seem to indicate a reduction in orbitofrontal control. I gave up, psychically, and I remember the few iterations where it happened: I remember internalizing a feeling, and not having the "oomph" to contain and defuse it. It was a feeling that consciously said "I give up", and so every action became increasingly lifeless, self-conscious, guarded, tense, and rushed. This anxiety "scaffolded" what was allowed to come through in my action. My perception "knew it", WAS IT, and I have the simultaneous shame of having another person partake in this quality of experience, engendered by me and "put" into you.
No wonder people hate shame. Shame-Hate might in fact be psychical twins - neurological actions that become neurally 'linked' by inherent properties in social and emotion relations. A human can't help but naturally hate shame. On the other hand, there is another part of you: a part that can be so quiet that your stubborn intention is to dilute it's presence. Love, compassion, acceptance, tolerance. The blissful feeling, lightness and ease of patient acceptance of what is. Anger, in it's stubborness and arrogance, is symptomatic of a mind overwhelmed by shame and defends against it through projecting on an external object. Through externalizing, it displaces and thus distorts the influence of unconscious processes in social relations. Ignorance of processes like these is the root cause of pain and suffering human society.
There a comes a point in every self-conscious human beings life when he honestly addresses what he feels: his fears, his deep, naked, vulnerability before the facts of life. He looks at it, acknowledges what he sees, but instead of identifying, and thus inevitably enacting what he feels, he instead chooses - exercises a capacity that no other creature possesses: affirmation, in an action, in a choice, he decides to love himself, forgive himself, calm himself, and make new promises, and commitments, to a newer understanding. My perceptions have the dimensions of a sphere. I can see so far - I cannot see what lies beyond the horizon. The curvature of perception, like that of the earth, inhibits knowledge of what lies beyond. But we know, always, that what lies beyond is different than what is here. In the next perception, we can know, breathe, and cool the fires in our belly's. Life feels better. Your mind feels stronger. You can trust yourself to be yourself. Not as performance. Not for anyone, but for you, because you feel it, and you should defend what you feel: to be, and to let yourself to be, is the core processes at the root of "selfhood".
Tuesday, 12 May 2015
The Other, Part Two
Coming back from trauma can be an absurd experience. Spending 13 years, as that, the non-me I instinctively strive to deny - and bring yourself back, from that! You can't help but relate to the world in a very self-other sort of way.
My mind occupies a pole beginning from the "inner witness"of simple awareness to an awareness of an "object" consciously experienced.
I am not the object, but the watcher. Trauma makes you see that. The fact that the mind can 'dissociate' from the body, can be felt as something 'anterior' the 'posterior' of self-experience, not only elucidates the the ontological primacy of awareness, but also confirms the necessity of the object in "creating" our effected self.
Our self is an object that we can 'create' by attending to our experiences in a non-judgemental and "mindful" way. But for me at least, or the historical feelings I've had with my nerves in my stomach and obsessions in my mind, I have also come to experience the ontological necessity of the "other" in 'mooring' me to something 'out there' . What is 'out there'? Think about a moment when you're actually and truly afraid. A sharp, quick explosion of feeling will emerge from the entrails of some ruminated percept; the fear is 'meaningful', and because it is meaningful, cognitively, for me, it'll engender a process in the brain that makes the body anxious towards movement.
That's the whole purpose of the HPA axis. To get the body moving in physical action - and away from the immediate threat to one's organism. But in our hyper-cerebral day and age, and not living in tune with the needs of our physical organism, the stress response system will get 'caught up' in a self- destructive positive feedback loop, with the negative thought, leading to FEAR (in Panksepps sense) which leads to perception of anxiety in the body - the limbs, neck, shoulder, chest, but especially the stomach; which leads to deeper attentional focus upon the thing that is feared, and so on until some negative feedback can be found to save the mind of the individual from the terror.
My point is, the worst the body can do to us - and the FEAR and fear it creates in our body and mind - forces the human individual into a dualistic posture. Usually, human beings don't find themselves completely alone in their existential suffering. They have a group of familiars around them, whether family, doctors, or friends. These people give suggestions to them. Early life, and the culture we all inhabit, contains 'talismans' of power, objects which promise existential salvation and experiential relief from the pains of human life. People pass these talismanic ideas between one another by talking about them; and in communicating them, we are mutually effected, both speaker and listener by the plausibility of their power.
But suggestion and the power of suggestion can only say so much. Evangelicals, Fundamentalist Muslims and many others have their "objects" by which they swear by; and again and again, they derive power. I would say 'science' is an object of power, but it's power is largely secular - not spiritual - and so strays from questions of love and fear.
When you're crippled and overwhelmed by fear, recoiling from the thoughts, images and perceptions of body as they smolder you with their power, one's mind reaches out as impulsively as the wailing arms of the crying infant, searching for it's mother. The mother-infant relationship makes the Self-other relationship a fundamental core of who we are: the environment is 'in us' from the get go. How can the inside yet be perceived as outside?
The pressures of life, paradoxically, teach us about the nature of life. If on is happy, go lucky, and pushing away all negativity, the world becomes linear, "stable" - or somewhat so - and comfortable. The illusion of this experience works powerfully in inhibiting people from discovering deeper truths that lies outside the periphery of their experience: they must widen it if they seek deeper truths. Which means, they must, in the mystical language of chaos theory, allow a little instability into their system in order to 'expand' their perceptual horizons.
But expansion requires integration, so again, to return to the issue of the 'other' and its most sly representative: thought. Thought is something we do so impulsively that people rarely consider it's ontological significance. But it's significance is simple. For any philosopher who feels 'good' about the way he sees the world, he has implicitly accepted the position - validity, and ontological status of - the perception he is positing by 'turning to it' in the act of thinking about it.
In their most desperate moments of fears, they 'recall' what they 'know' and calm themselves from within with the support of the thought. The thought 'moors' them and provides some solidity to their conscious experience. They feel "captains of their ship" and powerful in their ability to contain the tides.
Anyone who has tasted these horrendous experiences and who has turned inward, in love, to God, or the Universe, or whatever you want to call it, is acknowledging the deepest mystery that confronts the human condition: our embeddedness in a world where the essence works through us yet causes us to feel small and insignificant by the fact of our body and seperateness.
Life and healing comes from the inflow of that power - what can only be called a loving-kindness - into the heart and mind of the person. The viscera, before tightened and scored by anxious thoughts and feeling, is lightened by a feeling of tremendous gracefulness - peace - that paradoxically comes from a 'switching of perspective' from an act of thought. The thought sees the world and says to itself, suggestively, "relax", just 'accept', do not fight what is being felt, but just be with it. And why can we believe that we can 'just be with it'? Because we feel that love, that compassion, that lies at the core and center of human existence; built into us by the phylogeny of human evolution, and ingrained by the loving eyes of a mother.
The other is the fundamental "basis" of our capacity to feel love, to feel compassion, for ourselves, and for others. And in taking on such powerful experiences, the world becomes unified, compressed and folded inwards. Perception becomes more and more attuned, more and more secured by the eagerness of it's spiritness. With every thought upon feeling, a process already in motion becomes deepened, and the force which operates, as if, 'from without' becomes realized by virtue of it's organized 'containment' of the fear that it feels, by help, and with the support of the internalized "other".
My mind occupies a pole beginning from the "inner witness"of simple awareness to an awareness of an "object" consciously experienced.
I am not the object, but the watcher. Trauma makes you see that. The fact that the mind can 'dissociate' from the body, can be felt as something 'anterior' the 'posterior' of self-experience, not only elucidates the the ontological primacy of awareness, but also confirms the necessity of the object in "creating" our effected self.
Our self is an object that we can 'create' by attending to our experiences in a non-judgemental and "mindful" way. But for me at least, or the historical feelings I've had with my nerves in my stomach and obsessions in my mind, I have also come to experience the ontological necessity of the "other" in 'mooring' me to something 'out there' . What is 'out there'? Think about a moment when you're actually and truly afraid. A sharp, quick explosion of feeling will emerge from the entrails of some ruminated percept; the fear is 'meaningful', and because it is meaningful, cognitively, for me, it'll engender a process in the brain that makes the body anxious towards movement.
That's the whole purpose of the HPA axis. To get the body moving in physical action - and away from the immediate threat to one's organism. But in our hyper-cerebral day and age, and not living in tune with the needs of our physical organism, the stress response system will get 'caught up' in a self- destructive positive feedback loop, with the negative thought, leading to FEAR (in Panksepps sense) which leads to perception of anxiety in the body - the limbs, neck, shoulder, chest, but especially the stomach; which leads to deeper attentional focus upon the thing that is feared, and so on until some negative feedback can be found to save the mind of the individual from the terror.
My point is, the worst the body can do to us - and the FEAR and fear it creates in our body and mind - forces the human individual into a dualistic posture. Usually, human beings don't find themselves completely alone in their existential suffering. They have a group of familiars around them, whether family, doctors, or friends. These people give suggestions to them. Early life, and the culture we all inhabit, contains 'talismans' of power, objects which promise existential salvation and experiential relief from the pains of human life. People pass these talismanic ideas between one another by talking about them; and in communicating them, we are mutually effected, both speaker and listener by the plausibility of their power.
But suggestion and the power of suggestion can only say so much. Evangelicals, Fundamentalist Muslims and many others have their "objects" by which they swear by; and again and again, they derive power. I would say 'science' is an object of power, but it's power is largely secular - not spiritual - and so strays from questions of love and fear.
When you're crippled and overwhelmed by fear, recoiling from the thoughts, images and perceptions of body as they smolder you with their power, one's mind reaches out as impulsively as the wailing arms of the crying infant, searching for it's mother. The mother-infant relationship makes the Self-other relationship a fundamental core of who we are: the environment is 'in us' from the get go. How can the inside yet be perceived as outside?
The pressures of life, paradoxically, teach us about the nature of life. If on is happy, go lucky, and pushing away all negativity, the world becomes linear, "stable" - or somewhat so - and comfortable. The illusion of this experience works powerfully in inhibiting people from discovering deeper truths that lies outside the periphery of their experience: they must widen it if they seek deeper truths. Which means, they must, in the mystical language of chaos theory, allow a little instability into their system in order to 'expand' their perceptual horizons.
But expansion requires integration, so again, to return to the issue of the 'other' and its most sly representative: thought. Thought is something we do so impulsively that people rarely consider it's ontological significance. But it's significance is simple. For any philosopher who feels 'good' about the way he sees the world, he has implicitly accepted the position - validity, and ontological status of - the perception he is positing by 'turning to it' in the act of thinking about it.
In their most desperate moments of fears, they 'recall' what they 'know' and calm themselves from within with the support of the thought. The thought 'moors' them and provides some solidity to their conscious experience. They feel "captains of their ship" and powerful in their ability to contain the tides.
Anyone who has tasted these horrendous experiences and who has turned inward, in love, to God, or the Universe, or whatever you want to call it, is acknowledging the deepest mystery that confronts the human condition: our embeddedness in a world where the essence works through us yet causes us to feel small and insignificant by the fact of our body and seperateness.
Life and healing comes from the inflow of that power - what can only be called a loving-kindness - into the heart and mind of the person. The viscera, before tightened and scored by anxious thoughts and feeling, is lightened by a feeling of tremendous gracefulness - peace - that paradoxically comes from a 'switching of perspective' from an act of thought. The thought sees the world and says to itself, suggestively, "relax", just 'accept', do not fight what is being felt, but just be with it. And why can we believe that we can 'just be with it'? Because we feel that love, that compassion, that lies at the core and center of human existence; built into us by the phylogeny of human evolution, and ingrained by the loving eyes of a mother.
The other is the fundamental "basis" of our capacity to feel love, to feel compassion, for ourselves, and for others. And in taking on such powerful experiences, the world becomes unified, compressed and folded inwards. Perception becomes more and more attuned, more and more secured by the eagerness of it's spiritness. With every thought upon feeling, a process already in motion becomes deepened, and the force which operates, as if, 'from without' becomes realized by virtue of it's organized 'containment' of the fear that it feels, by help, and with the support of the internalized "other".
Tuesday, 5 May 2015
Light
Why does reading over your own words from another time cause us to feel and see our words so differently? Perhaps, this is an influence of the imprint of trauma on my nervous system. At certain moments, my mind can "stall" under some internally generated pressure. My mind roams and tries to probe, but it doesn't get far. I feel a type of "pressure" on the sides of my head, from the dorsolateral to the temporal bone. This feeling, I know so well - total capitulation - "out of work" - morbidly withdrawn. I feel nothing and so become nothing. Just a consciousness 'watching out' upon a world I feel alien from.
And then I fight and fight to scratch my way back in. That's the instinct. We lose something, we go right back after it. The dog chasing its tail. Which, ironically, is often laughed at by us because it's so ridiculous looking. But we pretty much do the same thing - chasing after the last moment, allowing ourselves to be built up by perceptions in our day to day social interactions. We feel and then we become motivated to anticipate; and in anticipating we provoke a response, which confirms our anticipation, and we follow on in this circular way in our day to day happenings.
There really is a fundamental wisdom about mindfulness. It represents an actual recognition of an 'anterior' aspect in our object-laden thinking. The very reaching motion, the motivation to act at all, extends from a "witness pole" to a "object pole". The object pole can also be more properly associated with the self, since the collection of meaningful objects we experience generates the phenomenological feeling of selfhood.
It can be so hard. Being addicted to weed. Addicted to laziness. Addicted to certain habits of being and thinking. My sister calls me an "addictive personality". But in saying that she occludes the generating activity of a borderline mother. But it's true. I feel a desperate neediness and desperate anxiety and tension and nervousness and hyperactivity.
My nervous system definitely is a "hyper-reactive" one. I'm sure my physiology now operates along this dynamic, which, in having irritable bowel syndrome, indicates the presence of how deeply involved the body is with the life of the mind. Our perceptions affect our body. Good feelings are "good", but they're also felt to be 'light', as in, barely noticeable, because the pleasure of the thing one is happy about puts into the periphery the effect it generates in the body.
Different body's move and synchronize in different ways. Yet I know that with a change in attitude, a focusing upon my body and relaxing into a state of slow, relaxed breathing, that I can allow myself to embrace affirming feelings of self agency. The body is truly, and absolutely, the key. The issue is connection with life - your life. Your interest in the world "out there" is what makes the world "in here". But both support the other. The key is being willing to connect with yourself, and for yourself.
The significance of this gesture feels to me to be at the heart of the human situation: how we deal with the otherness of life. Our place in it; the fact that we do in fact generate a 'self' that is built on a feedback between perceiving and background judgements of perception. The one feeds into the 'working models' of animal-level anticipation.
We are an other to ourselves, and so long as we feel that way to ourselves, we are likely to overlook the way our behavior affects others. Dislodged from 'within', naturally subserves disconnection from without. This fractal like quality is something that appears damn near everywhere we look.
And then I fight and fight to scratch my way back in. That's the instinct. We lose something, we go right back after it. The dog chasing its tail. Which, ironically, is often laughed at by us because it's so ridiculous looking. But we pretty much do the same thing - chasing after the last moment, allowing ourselves to be built up by perceptions in our day to day social interactions. We feel and then we become motivated to anticipate; and in anticipating we provoke a response, which confirms our anticipation, and we follow on in this circular way in our day to day happenings.
There really is a fundamental wisdom about mindfulness. It represents an actual recognition of an 'anterior' aspect in our object-laden thinking. The very reaching motion, the motivation to act at all, extends from a "witness pole" to a "object pole". The object pole can also be more properly associated with the self, since the collection of meaningful objects we experience generates the phenomenological feeling of selfhood.
It can be so hard. Being addicted to weed. Addicted to laziness. Addicted to certain habits of being and thinking. My sister calls me an "addictive personality". But in saying that she occludes the generating activity of a borderline mother. But it's true. I feel a desperate neediness and desperate anxiety and tension and nervousness and hyperactivity.
My nervous system definitely is a "hyper-reactive" one. I'm sure my physiology now operates along this dynamic, which, in having irritable bowel syndrome, indicates the presence of how deeply involved the body is with the life of the mind. Our perceptions affect our body. Good feelings are "good", but they're also felt to be 'light', as in, barely noticeable, because the pleasure of the thing one is happy about puts into the periphery the effect it generates in the body.
Different body's move and synchronize in different ways. Yet I know that with a change in attitude, a focusing upon my body and relaxing into a state of slow, relaxed breathing, that I can allow myself to embrace affirming feelings of self agency. The body is truly, and absolutely, the key. The issue is connection with life - your life. Your interest in the world "out there" is what makes the world "in here". But both support the other. The key is being willing to connect with yourself, and for yourself.
The significance of this gesture feels to me to be at the heart of the human situation: how we deal with the otherness of life. Our place in it; the fact that we do in fact generate a 'self' that is built on a feedback between perceiving and background judgements of perception. The one feeds into the 'working models' of animal-level anticipation.
We are an other to ourselves, and so long as we feel that way to ourselves, we are likely to overlook the way our behavior affects others. Dislodged from 'within', naturally subserves disconnection from without. This fractal like quality is something that appears damn near everywhere we look.
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